3 Tips to Help you Pick the Best Web Hosting Service in Australia

Many Australian businesses make the wrong choice when they select hosting for their website. This is because they simply choose a hosting company which has been recommended by their friends or the first one they see when they search online.

Source: ispace.co.za

This may work out well for them, but in the vast majority of cases, they could have made a better choice, if they had more information to hand. So here are three tips on making sure you select the best web hosting service in Australia, such as iiNet, for your business.

1. Your customer base is Australian

If your customers are based in Australia, it only makes sense to select a web hosting company located in Australia, but there is much more to it than that. Yes, selecting a web hosting company based in Australia will help our economy and support our workers, which is a good thing to do.

More important to your business, however, is whether their servers are also based in Australia. This is because many hosting companies actually have their servers located in the US, which means that US customers will be able to load your website quickly onto their browsers, whereas Australian based customers will find that your website loads very slowly.

2. How much bandwidth and data storage do they offer?

Most hosting companies offer packages based around bandwidth and storage capacity. So, if you don’t really know what you need, you could pay for far more than you use on a monthly basis.

Alternatively, you might select a package which is too small. This results in slow loading times and a penalty from the web host, because you are exceeding your bandwidth and storage allowances and slowing up everyone else’s website based on the same server.

So you need to select a web host who will work with you and help you to select a package that is right for your needs, both now and in the future, as your business grows.

3. What type of hosting do you need?

Shared hosting is the cheapest type of hosting and is where your website is hosted on a server with many other websites. The problem with shared hosting is that any of the websites on the server can cause everyone else’s websites to slow down or even crash, if they use too many of the shared resources.

Dedicated hosting is the most expensive type of hosting, where you do not share your resources with any other business, so no-one else will affect your site’s loading speed. The larger your business and the more traffic you have to your website, the more a dedicated server becomes necessary.

VPS hosting is in between shared and dedicated hosting and whilst you are still on a shared server, you have your own dedicated resources. This means that if another website on the same server has a spike in traffic, your site will not be affected and vice versa.

Reseller hosting is where a company sells you hosting, but they source the server space from a larger company. You need to be careful with this type of hosting, because if the server crashes or is hacked, then the reseller might not have direct access to the server and so has to wait for the actual owners of the infrastructure to fix the problem.

With these three tips you should have no trouble selecting the right web hosting company for your Australian business.